News

As we retreat to safe TV, home and garden, war provides the news backdrop to our lives. There hasn't been a period of peace in the world since nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now there are fears (and, in some quarters, hopes) of a new war with Iraq, with the usual fierce talk from non-combatants of "sending in the boys" and "taking out Saddam". The new "war on terror" looks like a frightening rerun of past preoccupations with "the enemy within" which could run for the foreseeable future.

Yet, although war never goes away, its relationship with welfare is rarely discussed. But it is a close and important one. There would have been no UK welfare state without the second world war. The Beveridge Report and the battle of El Alamein, the first significant allied victory, were reported in the same week. A comprehensive system of social security, free at the point of delivery, was to be the reward for victory, just as "homes fit for heroes" were promised after the Great War. But this time the struggle against a terrible tyranny gave the goal moral and political force. The war showed that state services could work.

It was the second world war that advanced the mass use of antibiotics, which could defeat TB and other diseases of poverty. They provided the most powerful tool of the new NHS. But it was also world wars that led to the pre-eminence of regulatory psychiatry.

War can help powerful people who run faltering economies. Upping military expenditure has a way of creating wealth for them. But, for everyone else, it means the production of welfare needs through death, disease, poverty, loss and homelessness. What defined 20th century war was that, for the first time, there were far more civilian than military casualties. The journal, Disability & Society, is planning a special issue focusing on war, conflict and disability to explore these issues.

Another of the consequences of war is the creation of refugees. Reframed as "asylum seekers" and "economic migrants", their regulation now dominates orthodox social policy discourse. They have taken over from lone parents and "the underclass" as the pariahs of western welfare states. They are denied the most basic entitlements. Many welfare workers feel shamed by the role they are expected to play in policing them. Now the plan is to segregate refugees in the spirit of the Victorian poor law. What must it take before, safe in our own armchairs, we again allow victims of war access to the benefits of welfare in the founding spirit of the welfare state?